Thousands Turn Out to Wire Calif. Schools for the Internet

Barry Kim had just climbed down from a ladder after spending a
half-hour stapling computer cables along a 70-year-old wall, when he
learned he'd have to do the job over again.

Susan Southwick, who was overseeing the work of Mr. Kim and other
volunteers at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School here, insisted that
the work be redone. The wires, she explained, should have been placed
under an exposed pipe, not over it.

Ms. Southwick, an engineer with Sun Microsystems Inc., was a
stickler for details. She and the handful of enthusiastic student and
community volunteers were helping link Flynn Elementary's students with
the rest of the world through telecommunications networks.

They, and thousands of other volunteers, spread out among
California's schools March 9 for NetDay96, a grassroots effort to
prepare the state's schools for access to the Internet.

The number of participants was difficult to verify because the
one-day event was organized entirely through the medium of the
Internet's World Wide Web. But John Gage, one of the event's
organizers, estimated that at least 20,000 volunteers laid more than 6
million feet of cable in roughly 5,000 California schools.

The event received national publicity and was hailed as a success by
its organizers and by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, who
pitched in to help wire a high school.

But Mr. Gage and others acknowledged that the fruits of the volunteer labor weren't distributed evenly.

At Flynn Elementary, which draws a quarter of its students from San
Francisco's largest public-housing project in the city's Mission
district, there were no parent volunteers. There also were few modern
computers.

Across the Golden Gate bridge in affluent Marin County, home of many
of the nation's largest software and computer-game companies, the
situation was different.

At James B. Davidson Middle School in San Rafael, where two of his
children go to school,veterinarian Terry Cosgrove banged covers into
place over wiring strips in a large and airy building.

The NetDay workers at Davidson followed a long-range technology plan
for the school, funded in large part by local businesses, that Mr.
Cosgrove helped develop. The volunteers put the finishing touches on
the conversion of a 1950s-era building on the campus into a
computerized math and science lab. New computers were locked in a
nearby building, still in their boxes.

"This is a $400,000 project. We're doing it for $150,000," Mr.
Cosgrove said proudly. "We're well beyond the basic NetDay idea."

Billed in part as a great technological leveler, NetDay not only
brought out the best in many volunteers, but also brought to the fore
some important questions of equity in the information age.

Presidential Support

Though the event drew extensive media coverage, for the most part it
was not the Susan Southwicks and John Cosgroves who made the
headlines.

That attention inevitably went to the two highest-profile
volunteers, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, who unrolled a spool of cable at
Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, an hour's drive east of San
Francisco.

Standing before 200 volunteers and addressing a crowd of more than
5,000 people, Mr. Clinton praised NetDay as a national model of
volunteerism.

"What you're doing today is America at its very best," he told the
cheering crowd. "NetDay is a modern version of an old-fashioned
barn-raising."

Mr. Clinton has long stressed the need to bring new technology to
schools. But the issue has extra appeal in this election year, and it
was obvious that the president hadn't overlooked the political value of
NetDay in a state that is a coveted electoral prize.

Outside the crowded courtyard, eager volunteers distributed campaign
materials and did a brisk business in Clinton-Gore T-shirts.

Uneven Distribution

Described by many as a throwback to the activism of the 1960s,
NetDay was conceived by Mr. Gage, the chief scientist for Mountain
View, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems, and Michael Kaufman, the director
of information technology at KQED, San Francisco's public-broadcasting
affiliate.

Mr. Gage brought experience he gained years ago organizing national
protests against the Vietnam War to use in planning for NetDay.

Both he and Mr. Kaufman shared the stage at Ygnacio High with the
president.

"The country will long be in their debt," Mr. Clinton said. "They
have come up with something remarkable."

Yet Mr. Gage conceded that though many more than 20,000 volunteers
may have joined in the event statewide, some schools had far more help
than others.

Although 5,000 schools were expecting volunteers, an additional
8,000 in the state had "nothing going on," he said. He urged volunteers
to continue their work throughout the school year.

Mr. Clinton, meanwhile, announced that his administration was
considering ways to use the NetDay model nationwide.

Liability Concerns

That prospect, however, was not greeted warmly everywhere.

Although unwilling to criticize the event publicly, some state-level
technology coordinators outside California said they were afraid that
NetDay might set an unfortunate precedent. The event, they said, raised
important concerns about both liability and equity.

The California School Boards Association also sent a letter to its
members warning them of legal dangers.

School districts were at risk of liability, the group cautioned,
both for any injuries to volunteers and for any harm or damage that
might be caused by the work they performed.

And some school districts were reluctant to take part in NetDay
because they already have their own long-range technology plans.

"We never turn down a volunteer, because that's never a good thing
to do," said David Gordon, the superintendent of the 31,000-student Elk
Grove Unified district in Sacramento, which is in the midst of a
sophisticated program to wire schools and to provide teachers with
computers. "But this is a situation where we would have to redo all of
this work to take on volunteers."

Though hailed as the first such event to be organized solely through
the Internet, that distinction created some problems. Mr. Gage noted
that many schools without access to the global computer network were
largely unaware of NetDay until days before it happened.

"I don't know that this is the model that they want to replicate,"
said Mr. Kim, the Flynn Elementary volunteer, who is also a software
developer for Netscape Communications Corp., based in Mountain
View.

He said it was hard for volunteers to find out exactly what they
were supposed to do, and pointed out that there was no central office
to call for information.

But, he said during his short break from stapling wires, "despite
the disorganization, it's coming together."

Other volunteers said they found the informal, ad hoc nature of
NetDay troubling.

Susan Mahony, who teaches at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High
School in San Francisco, said she volunteered to help wire Flynn
Elementary because, as a former teacher there, she worried that parents
would not show up. She asked Ms. Southwick to help and brought eight
student volunteers from her after-school network-telecommunications
class.

Though she was glad to help out, she added that she was angry that
schools must resort to tactics such as NetDay at all to provide even
rudimentary telecommunications links.

"If they wanted to wire the central offices," she said, "they
wouldn't call up the taxpayers and say, 'We would you like to volunteer
your time."'

Vol. 15, Issue 26, Pages 8-9

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